Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President and Home Minister Amit Shah will not be visiting Telangana on September 17, as the state unit of his party gears up to commemorate 'Liberation Day'.
This is likely to affect the morale of BJP cadres, who were eager for Amit Shah's visit and had made several arrangements for events across the state, for September 17.
The party has planned 'tiranga yatras' across the state and its leaders and cadres will hoist the national flag in all 33 districts to mark the occasion. A public meeting is also scheduled at Patancheru near Hyderabad.
Union Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy and three other BJP Lok Sabha members from the state will be participating in the celebrations.
It was on this day in 1948 that then Hyderabad State was merged with the Indian Union following the Centre's military action. The BJP has claimed that the last Nizam of Hyderabad State, Mir Osman Ali Khan, was not ready to accede to the Indian Union but Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel succeeded in making Hyderabad do so, with the military action.
While the reason for Amit Shah's decision is unclear, media reports suggest that he had other commitments to attend to. Senior leaders of the state BJP assured cadres that they would still go ahead with the commemoration.
The BJP also alleges that the Nizam's Army and his private militia 'Razakars' committed excesses and tried to suppress the freedom struggle.
Aiming to emerge as an alternative to the ruling TRS, the BJP is looking to garner maximum political benefit from its two-decade-old demand for the official celebration of Telangana Liberation Day on September 17.
Preparing the ground for the celebrations, a delegation of BJP leaders led by the party's state unit chief K. Laxman on Saturday met Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan, urging her to direct the state government to officially celebrate Telangana Liberation Day.
Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, while speaking in the Assembly in the past, had rejected the demand for celebrating 'Telangana Liberation Day'. The TRS chief said the historic event can only be termed as "transition from monarchy to democracy" and not as liberation.
Stating that the BJP wished to portray the day as "liberation from Muslim rule", KCR had said it was not the government's wish to antagonise any particular community.
IANS inputs